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One of the best things to do for your business right now is get to work transforming your customer experience and customer service to be Millennial-friendly. This will require some time on your part developing an understanding of what's unique about Millennials, and what this important generation of consumers are looking for. Here's a crash course on this subject, in honor of National Small Business Week – #SmallBusinessWeek.

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Let me start with why we care about Millennials in the first place, and particularly about what they want as consumers and the kind of customer experiences that suit them best. There are two distinct reasons.

First, Millennials (born 1980ish-2000ish) are, in their own right, powerful consumers. The Millennial generation is the largest in American history (even larger than the baby boom and notably larger than Generation X), and its members have a large and rapidly increasing purchase power both as consumers and in the businesses where they are rapidly assuming powerful positions. Millennials are quickly becoming the most important consumers encountered by most types of business, with a spending power that is estimated to be worth $10 trillion over their lifetimes.

Second, Millennials are powerful trendsetters. What millennials, the first digitally native generation, are looking for from your business today foreshadows what their parents, uncles, aunts, and older sibling will want from you tomorrow. As innovation expert Christopher Hunsberger tells me in my book, Your Customer is the Star: How To Make Millennials, Boomers and Everyone Else Love Your Business (free chapter link), which was originally published by Forbes and from which the material in this article is paraphrased or excerpted, “Millennial customers are an important group of guests in their own right. But their significance is more than that: They’re a unique group in terms of their impact on the rest of our customer base. The behaviors and expectations of the Millennial group of guests tend to shape the thinking of the rest of us.”

Here are five essential principles of Millennial customers, gathered from my research and prior writings, that will be helpful to you in creating a Millennial-friendly customer experience and providing a customer experience that will attract them to your business and keep them engaged.

(As you read the principles below, please keep in mind that generalizations only go so far, and that the preferences of any particular consumer within a generation are more distinct from those of any other consumer within that generation than a demographic generalization would suggest. Nonetheless, these five principles should help you get a handle on what Millennials, all things being equal, value, and should be helpful as you start to craft a Millennial-friendly customer experience.)

1. Millennial Consumers Have an Ethos of Collaboration (Including When it Comes to Your Business or Brand)

Millennials enjoy the possibility of collaborating with businesses and brands, as long as they believe their say matters to the company in question. They don’t necessarily see a clear boundary between the customer and the brand, the customer and marketer, or the customer and service provider. Alex Castellarnau at Dropbox, the popular file transfer service, put it to me this way: With Millennials, “a new brand, service or product is only started by the company; it’s finished by the customers. Millennials are a generation that wants to co-create the product, the brand, with you. Companies that understand this and figure out ways to engage in this co-creation relationship with Millennials will have an edge.”

2. Millennials Are Hypersocial.

Millennials are a particularly sociable generation. This sociability is expressed online as well as in real life, particularly in the arenas where online and offline activities and circles of friends overlap. Offline, Millennials are more likely than other generations to shop, dine and travel with groups, whether these are organized interest groups, less formal groupings of peers or excursions with extended family, according to Boston Consulting Group data. Online, their sharing habits on Facebook, Snapchat and other social sites, and the opinions they offer on Yelp, TripAdvisor and Amazon, reflect their eagerness for connection, as do their electronic alerts to friends and followers that show off where they are, where they’re coming from and where they’re headed—online alerts that reflect and affect behavior in the physical world.

This social behavior has big implications for those of us who serve customers. Millennials don’t consume food, beverages, services, products or media in silence. They eat noisily (so to speak) and very visually. They review, tweet, use Instagram, update Wikipedia entries and post YouTube videos. Often these posts concern their consumption activities, interests and aspirations. All told, as Boston Consulting Group reports, “the vast majority of Millennials report taking action on behalf of brands and sharing brand preferences in their social groups.”

Here’s another revolutionary fact about Millennial sociability: Millennials get along with their parents. According to Pew, teenagers today get into fewer fights with their parents than Mom and Dad did with theirs as teens. According to Joeri Van den Bergh and Mattias Behrer, authors of How Cool Brands Stay Hot, six out of 10 teens (of course, not all Millennials are teens anymore) eat with their family four or more nights per week. Incredibly, 85% of Millennials who are teens name one of their parents as their best friend, rather than naming a peer. And more than a third of Millennials of all ages say they influence what products their parents buy, what shops and restaurants they visit and what trips they take.

This striking lack of conflict between generations means that Millennials can be vital carriers of a business’s commercial message to not only their friends but also their parents. At the rate they’re spreading the word, it won’t be long until almost everyone passes for a Millennial, as far as attitude and buying patterns go.

3. Millennials Expect Technology To Work–Easily And Always.

They’ve grown up with digital devices that bundle communication, entertainment, shopping, mapping and education all in one, and from an early age, smartphone use, GPS’s that render map reading unnecessary, and apps for nearly every function imaginable have been the norm.

Technology has become far more user friendly during Millennials’ lifetimes, particularly when compared to what previous generations encountered. The relentless focus on simplifying the user interface at Apple, Amazon, Google and lesser-known technology players has set a new standard of intuitiveness across the tech industry that Millennials accept as the norm. Businesses should be careful not to throw clunky, alienating devices or websites at these customers and expect patience or understanding as customers struggle to find a workaround.

Millennial customers crave the joy of adventures and discoveries, whether epic or everyday. Millennials often view commerce and even obligatory business travel as opportunities rather than burdens, due to the adventures that can be had along the way. I’m reluctant to chalk up this phenomenon to youthful wanderlust alone, because the breadth of experiences this generation craves suggests there’s something more at work:

When shopping, they prefer what’s known as an “experiential lifestyle environment” (a retail environment where shopping is not just a transaction and the pleasure of being in the store isn’t limited to the goods customers take home).

Far more Millennials than non-Millennials report a desire to visit every continent and travel abroad as much as possible.

More than twice as many Millennials as those in other age brackets say they are willing “to encounter danger in pursuit of excitement.”

When Millennials dine out, for example, they’re often in search of something exotic, adventuresome, memorable or new to explore during their dining experience. This has helped transform cuisine searches (“tastespotting”) into an adventure—and food truck-following into its own culture.

5. Millennial Consumers Are Values-Driven, And They Crave and Seek Out “Authenticity.”

Millennials are a notably values-driven generation. This can be attributed to their upbringing. Boomer parents have taught their children that every voice matters, that bullying is bad and equality is worth fighting for, that it takes a village.

More Millennials than non-Millennials integrate their beliefs and causes into their choice of companies to support, their purchases and their day-to-day interactions. More than 50% of millennials make an effort to buy products from companies that support the causes they care about, according to research from Barkley, an independent advertising agency. They’re twice as likely to care about whether or not their food is organic than are their non-Millennial counterparts. When you consider how money-strapped many Millennials remain, their willingness to put a premium on such issues is striking.

It's not only political and ethical issues that move Millennials. They also care about what’s genuine and authentic. This interest falls somewhere between a purely aesthetic preference and a search for honesty, for truth. And it’s a powerful force for motivating Millennial customers.